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New Legends & Lore: Player vs. Character
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<blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5672286" data-attributes="member: 2067"><p>But then, I wonder...what is the value of the interlocking set? </p><p></p><p>D&D is played by lots of different people playing lots of different campaigns. No one interlocking set of rules is going to be able to encompass them all. No one who wants, say, a narrative combat system is going to be happy with a minis grid, and if you make that minis grid combat system central to the game, you have effectively said, "We only want to attract people who are interested in <em>this</em>." No one who wants a grim-n-gritty system is going to be happy with wahoo levels of HP. No one who wants a magic-light game is going to be content with a game that depends on frequent and ever-increasing magic items. It's stuck. It can't be modified. It's inflexible. And because it takes so much time and effort and development cash to get right, it's not something you want to go back and re-visit very often. </p><p></p><p>Perhaps the closest we've been to this ideal is during the heyday of the d20 System, with its hundreds of variants on everything from hundreds of different publishers. Even then, D&D was only D&D, and they only used the core tightly interlocking system, without branching out themselves very much at all. </p><p></p><p>No one set of complex rules is going to be good for every group, so it would seem, at the level of publisher, that the ideal would be to produce a huge ecosystem of modular rules, variants, and custom content, none of which goes very "deep," but which is more easily cherry-picked. The "depth" can be added with bonus content (like Dragon and Dungeon magazines), or from house rules, but it would seem that breadth would be the more valuable thing, from the perspective of someone with limited resources to spend on developing rules.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="I'm A Banana, post: 5672286, member: 2067"] But then, I wonder...what is the value of the interlocking set? D&D is played by lots of different people playing lots of different campaigns. No one interlocking set of rules is going to be able to encompass them all. No one who wants, say, a narrative combat system is going to be happy with a minis grid, and if you make that minis grid combat system central to the game, you have effectively said, "We only want to attract people who are interested in [I]this[/I]." No one who wants a grim-n-gritty system is going to be happy with wahoo levels of HP. No one who wants a magic-light game is going to be content with a game that depends on frequent and ever-increasing magic items. It's stuck. It can't be modified. It's inflexible. And because it takes so much time and effort and development cash to get right, it's not something you want to go back and re-visit very often. Perhaps the closest we've been to this ideal is during the heyday of the d20 System, with its hundreds of variants on everything from hundreds of different publishers. Even then, D&D was only D&D, and they only used the core tightly interlocking system, without branching out themselves very much at all. No one set of complex rules is going to be good for every group, so it would seem, at the level of publisher, that the ideal would be to produce a huge ecosystem of modular rules, variants, and custom content, none of which goes very "deep," but which is more easily cherry-picked. The "depth" can be added with bonus content (like Dragon and Dungeon magazines), or from house rules, but it would seem that breadth would be the more valuable thing, from the perspective of someone with limited resources to spend on developing rules. [/QUOTE]
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